Away from home.
It has been so long since she used a metaphor!
Metaphors are our means of bringing our disparate worlds together through words. Home in this brief tale seems both a literal and metaphorical place. We are fortunate indeed perhaps if we are truly home at home. Many relationships falter when a we realise how little at home we are with each other, and this unhomeliness may be felt through our inability to ‘get’ anothers’ metaphors and similes. Language is not secondary to experience, it delivers our experience to us so we can reexperience it if necessary! It is primary!
And if we are exploring new worlds, far our from our familiar places, then the loss of the unifying context through metaphor may add to our sense of estrangement and strangeness.
If I want to reach ‘you’ I may reach for a metaphor to bring my context to you. And if you want me to ‘get’ you, then once again we may reach across the solitariness of the human condition through metaphor and simile. Figurative langauage allows us to figure out the ways in which my world and your world may connect. Only connect! Exclaimed E M Forster in the famous Modernist cry.
How many times have all of us felt the need for an urgent metaphor to make another understand our experience? When we have run out of metaphors with another, then we have run out of that relationship? Relationships prosper or founder on our ability to connect through metaphor.
So many questions from this glancing moment captured by Davis’s incisive prose. I wonder if daily dullness destroys our confidence in metaphors? For figurative language involves daring and risk?